Thesis advisor: Frederick G. Lawrence / Johannine literature explains the meaning of Jesus of Nazareth and our relationship with God in terms of logos and agape: the Logos is Theos (Jn 1) and Theos is Agape (1Jn 4). The goal of this dissertation is to relate these two, understanding and love, to develop a master analogy for the revelation of God to human beings. This is elaborated through close reading and commentary on classic texts by two Doctors of the Church, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, in an attempt to reconcile voluntarist and intellectualist approaches to the question of God by showing how the act of understanding is analogous with the act of love. Augustine would integrate his understanding of Scripture and philosophy into his theory of the inner word (verbum mentis) as the image of the Triune God. This consummate theological achievement is also a meta-analysis of personal communication by a master of the art of rhetoric, defined as “the good man, skilled in speaking” (vir bonus, dicendi peritus) by Cato the Elder in Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria. The Bishop of Hippo affirms the words of a wise person as the ideal of communication, as perfected in the life of the Christian evangelist. A systematic exegesis of Augustine’s personal, rhetorical, and theological synthesis, the first part of this dissertation is a study of several key texts to explore how the Doctor of Grace relates love with understanding, the words of Scripture with those of the philosophers. Thomas Aquinas develops Augustine’s insights in the theological system of his Summa theologiae, expanding the theory of the inner word into a theoretical synthesis uniting reason and faith, scientia and sapientia, which the Doctor of Grace was not able to achieve. The second part of the dissertation analyzes and complements the reading of Augustine in the first part by testing it in dialogue with Aquinas’ treatment of the same themes—understanding and love—in the First and Second Parts of the Summa as representative of his mature thought. The study of these two figures is intended as an attempt to apply Lonergan’s Method in Theology. By developing the relationship between knowing the truth and loving it, this project expands upon his efforts to sublate the linguistic phenomenology of Heidegger’s hermeneutic revolution within a theological system. Lonergan formulates his own hermeneutic as four levels of knowing: experiencing, understanding, judging, deciding. Having his insight on the centrality of love late in life, however, he would leave his interpreters with the question of how to integrate knowing with loving. The exigencies of publishing Method would also mean leaving the problem of communication as a challenge for his successors. This dissertation seeks to propose a solution with the retrieval of Augustine’s hermeneutic of caritas as a model for communicating Christian self-appropriation through a phenomenology of how we realize the logos. We understand the meaning of a whole by recognizing the order in which all its parts fit together. In this way, judgment operates analogically as a determination of the fittingness of a logical proportion. And so, as Logos, God is the order into which all things fit together, revealed to us as a complementary pattern, which is expressed through analogy. In the Catholic tradition, this pattern of grace is consummated by receiving bread and wine sacramentally, and recognizing in them the essence of our relationship with God as well as one another, as we realize this loving relationship as the form of all our acts. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

No / This paper presents the findings from the evaluation of a 'learning partnership' scheme between Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) staff and senior managers within a University in the UK.

In this dissertation, I start with an analysis of negation in eleven benchmark corpora covering six Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks. With a thorough investigation, I first show that (a) these benchmarks contain fewer negations compared to general-purpose English and (b) the few negations they contain are often unimportant. Further, my empirical studies demonstrate that state-of-the-art transformers trained using these corpora obtain substantially worse results with the instances that contain negation, especially if the negations are important. Second, I investigate whether translating negation is also an issue for modern machine translation (MT) systems. My studies find that indeed the presence of negation can significantly impact translation quality, in some cases resulting in reductions of over 60%. In light of these findings, I investigate strategies to better understand the semantics of negation. I start with identifying the focus of negation. I develop a neural model that takes into account the scope of negation, context from neighboring sentences, or both. My best proposed system obtains an accuracy improvement of 7.4% over prior work. Further, I analyze the main error categories of the systems through a detailed error analysis. Next, I explore more practical ways to understand the semantics of negation. I consider revealing the meaning of negation by revealing their affirmative interpretations. First, I propose a question-answer driven approach to create AFIN, a collection of 3,001 sentences with verbal negations and their affirmative interpretations. Then, I present an automated procedure to collect pairs of sentences with negation and their affirmative interpretations, resulting in over 150,000 pairs. Experimental results demonstrate that leveraging these pairs helps (a) a T5 system generate affirmative interpretations from negations in AFIN and (b) state-of-the-art transformers solve natural language understanding tasks, including natural language inference and sentiment analysis. Furthermore, I develop a plug-and-play affirmative interpretation generator that is potentially useful in improving a number of natural language understanding tasks where negation poses a challenge.

In the future, as world markets become more diverse, designers will be increasingly asked to create products for people dissimilar to themselves. Human issues, such as product pleasure, will also become more important as advances in manufacturing (enabling companies to produce high quality goods more cheaply) will mean companies will look elsewhere to achieve a competitive edge. These changes will affect designers who presently work with little or no user information. This thesis investigates the attributes designers need in resources that offer them an immediate yet broad understanding of users. The research presented in the thesis has a philosophical strand and a design strand. In the design strand, two mock up resources and a prototype resource are developed. These creations are used in the philosophical strand: the mock ups are used to provide focus while collecting opinions from participants and the prototype is evaluated at the end of the research as if it were a real resource. The thesis starts with a literature review; this review reveals that designers need to understand users' physical, psychological and social needs as well as their environments if they are to design appropriate products for them. It explains that designers find much ergonomics information too technical and not visual enough and reveals that no tools or methods exist that offer a broad and instant understanding of users at the start of the design process. Following this, the results from a set of interviews and a focus group are presented. These studies reveal that designers want both personal and general user information that is reliable, video based, contextual and authentic. The results also show that designers want a fast, online resource that allows information to be easily tagged, compared and shared. Next, the thesis describes the development of the prototype resource and its examination using a heuristic inspection. This resource is then evaluated by designers. The evaluation reveals that designers perceived that the resource would be of value to the design process and thought that the videos showing people going about their everyday lives and the virtual tours around people's homes would be particularly useful. The thesis concludes that designers want contextual user information presented as easily navigable video in an Internet based resource. In doing so, it provides an original contribution to knowledge.

This thesis explores a conceptual understanding of dialogue within a community of practice. It argues that meaningful conversations are at the core of critical, reflective, and analytical praxis, and that a critical understanding holds transformative possibilities for teaching and learning. Aspects of western and ethnic paradigms and their theoretical constructs, which may either enhance or hinder current practices, are identified, as are elements that arise from several case studies drawn from a large banking organisation operating out of South Africa. It is hoped that an evaluation of the research findings will provide a basis for an understanding of dialogue within a local context and that, further, it will provide a platform for extended dialogical exploration and research.

Summarization models which operate on meaning representations of documents have been neglected in the past, although they are a very promising and interesting class of methods for summarization and text understanding. In this thesis, I present one such summarizer, which uses the proposition as its meaning representation. My summarizer is an implementation of Kintsch and van Dijk's model of comprehension, which uses a tree of propositions to represent the working memory. The input document is processed incrementally in iterations. In each iteration, new propositions are connected to the tree under the principle of local coherence, and then a forgetting mechanism is applied so that only a few important propositions are retained in the tree for the next iteration. A summary can be generated using the propositions which are frequently retained. Originally, this model was only played through by hand by its inventors using human-created propositions. In this work, I turned it into a fully automatic model using current NLP technologies. First, I create propositions by obtaining and then transforming a syntactic parse. Second, I have devised algorithms to numerically evaluate alternative ways of adding a new proposition, as well as to predict necessary changes in the tree. Third, I compared different methods of modelling local coherence, including coreference resolution, distributional similarity, and lexical chains. In the first group of experiments, my summarizer realizes summary propositions by sentence extraction. These experiments show that my summarizer outperforms several state-of-the-art summarizers. The second group of experiments concerns abstractive generation from propositions, which is a collaborative project. I have investigated the option of compressing extracted sentences, but generation from propositions has been shown to provide better information packaging.

The purposes of this study were to investigate sixth grade students&rsquo / understanding of multiplication of fractions in terms of the Pirie&ndash / Kieren Model of Understanding in the light of use of multiple representations and to improve mapping feature of the current theory to increase depicting power of the maps produced. One of the qualitative research methods, case study design was used. This study was conducted with two sixth grade students at a public school in Etimesgut, Ankara in the spring semester of 2009-2010. Students learnt fractions. They completed activity sheets during the lessons. They completed self-evaluation forms and wrote journals just after the instruction. After that semi- structured interviews were conducted with two students in order to analyze their understanding about multiplication of fractions. The data collected from interviews were used to reveal understanding maps of each student. Moreover, the data from activity sheets, student journals, observations, and self-evaluation forms were used to strengthen the findings from the interviews. This study showed that there was a relationship between students&rsquo / preference on the use of different type of representations and attained understanding level of multiplication of fractions. It was also found that establishing connection between multiplication of fraction concept and real life usage of these concepts and extending whole number multiplication to the multiplication with the fractions were acted as an obstacle for understanding the multiplication of fractions. In the current study, it was seen that there was a relationship between question type and students use of representations. Moreover, teachers should use different type of representations in their classrooms more frequently in order to help students to reach higher level of understandings. Teachers should also connect new ideas to what the students have already learned for deeper understanding of them.

Languages within one language family may be so closely related that their speakers often communicate, each using their own language. This phenomenon was investigated in African, Germanic and Romance languages and coined as semicommunication by Haugen (1966), and later became receptive multilingualism by Braunm&uuml / ller (2002). This research attempts to find out if receptive multilingual communication is possible in Slavonic languages (Polish, Russian and Ukrainian). Besides, it was a great importance to define whether the success of communication is symmetric among the speakers of the mentioned languages. Finally, various cases of problematic understanding were analyzed with the main emphasis on the speakers&rsquo / strategies when they try to overcome reception problems. Methodically, 4 Russian-Ukrainian, 4 Polish-Ukrainian and 4 Polish-Russian conversations were recorded with the use of digital camera. Cases of problematic understanding were defined and transcribed with Exmaralda program, Partitur editor. Number of problematic utterances in relation to total number of utterances in discourse was the measure of communication success in each language constellation. In order to see the overall picture of how receptive multilingualism works in the three languages and in each constellation separately, the statistic research was done with SPSS program. The findings of the research revealed that receptive multilingual communication among Polish, Russian and Ukrainian speakers is generally successful, however, not symmetric with respect to understanding degree in different constellations.

I denna undersökning utforskas betydelsen av intersubjektiv kontakt och delad förståelse som en väg att samskapa en förståelseorienterad vägledning i den terapeutiska processen och det dagliga familjelivet. Undersökningens syfte är att utforska båda parters upplevelse av delad förståelse och dess betydelse i systemisk familjeterapi. Frågeställningarna fokuseras på vad som kännetecknar tillstånd av närvaro respektive frånvaro av intersubjektiv kontakt och förståelse. Samt vilken betydelse och vilka konsekvenser denna närvaro/ frånvaro har för terapeut och familj. Undersökningen baseras på fyra kliniska fallbeskrivningar återgivna ur båda parters perspektiv. Genom oberoende intervjuer utforskas båda parters terapierfarenheter efter avslutad terapi. Resultat av studien visar att intersubjektiv närvaro och förståelse i terapin är en nödvändig och avgörande faktor för att utvidga och öka den intersubjektiva kompetensen i systemet. Resultaten visar även på hur denna närvaro i den gemensamma terapeutiska processen blir en sorts modellerande kraft som bär vidare i familjernas vardag. Detta ökar förmågan att ta den andres perspektiv och svara på varandras inre livsvärld. En förståelseorienterad vägledning utvecklas. Resultaten visar god överensstämmelse med teori och forskning inom området. Resultaten har även kliniska implikationer och visar på vikten av att i såväl utbildning som handledning av psykoterapeuter uppmärksamma förståelsens centrala betydelse i det professionella mötet och i klinisk praktik. / This study explores the impact of mutual and shared understanding as a way to create an understanding-oriented guidance in family-therapy and in daily family life. The intention is to investigate the reciprocal experience of shared understanding and it ́s significance in family therapi. The questions focus on what charactarizes the states of prescence or abscence of intersubjective contact and understanding as well as what impact these states will have on the therapist and the family. The survey is based on four clinical case-histories reproduced from the therapists and the families ́ perspectives. Independent interviews explore both parties ́ experiences of the therapy after it was completed.Results of the study show that intersubjective presence and understanding during therapy is an essential and vital factor to extend and increase the intersubjective competence in the system. The results also show how the mutual therapeutic process presence is a kind of modeling force that carries on in families' everyday lives. This process developes the ability to take the other ́s perspective and respond to each other ́s inner world. An understanding-oriented guidance evolves. The results show good accordance with theory and research in the actual science field. They also have clinical implications and emphasizes the importance in both training and supervision of psychotherapists to payattention to the central importance of understanding in the professional meeting and in clinical practice.

Syftet med studien är att fördjupa kunskapen om hur eleverna introduceras till likhetstecknet och vilka svårigheter som ligger till grund för att eleverna brister i sin förståelse kring likhetstecknet. Studien utgår från två forskningsfrågor. I studien används en kvalitativ ansats i form av semistrukturerade intervjuer. I resultatet framkommer det att eleverna i viss mån introduceras till symbolerna för större än och mindre än samtidigt, dock är det få som även får kunskap om olikhetstecknet. Svårigheterna hos eleverna är att de utgår från en operationell förståelse för tecknet, att ett resultat ska räknas fram. Denna svårighet beror på bristande förståelse för likhetstecknet vilket kan påverka eleverna när de introduceras för ekvationer. Vår slutsats är att för att motverka detta bör lärarna arbeta med att utveckla den relationella förståelsen genom varierande räknehändelser och bör även introducera alla relevanta symboler samtidigt som större än, mindre än och olikhetstecknet samt undvika symboler för de olika räknesätt under denna introduktion för att undvika att eleverna skapar en operationell förståelse. / The purpose of the study is to deepen the knowledge about how students are introduced to the equal sign and what difficulties underlie the students' lack of understanding of the equal sign. The study is based on two research questions. In the study uses a qualitative approach in the form of semi-structured interviews. In the result appears that the students are to some extent introduced to the symbols for greater than and less than at the same time, however, few also gain knowledge of the sign of dissimilarity. The difficulty of the students is that they start from a operational understanding of the sign, that a result should be calculated. This difficulty is due to a lack of understanding of the equal sign, which can affect students when introduced to equations. Our conclusion is that to counteract this, teachers should work on developing the relational understanding through varying counting events and should also introduce all relevant symbols while being greater than, less than and the sign of difference and avoiding symbols for the different counting methods during this introduction to avoid students creating an operational understanding.